This question is one that is on many business owners’ minds when they start their online presence, and it’s a problem that can easily persist if it isn’t addressed properly. There are many reasons that people aren’t finding your web-page online, but they oftentimes boil down to a few issues that, if handled diligently, can completely change your website’s fortunes. Here are the 5 most common reasons that your online traffic is lower than expected.

Google Isn’t Finding Your Site

Every day, Google is used as a search engine about 3.5 BILLION times. This is a tremendous opportunity for businesses to get their name and face out there to consumers, but to do so, you have to understand how Google generates its results and how you can get your site higher. Google, and every other search engine for that matter, use complex algorithms to find websites that match a user’s query. Oftentimes these algorithms rely on a few key aspects of a web-page in order to pin it to the search result. Namely, these are the relevance of your site to any words searched, and the time frame your online content was posted.

Google uses bots known as ‘crawlers’ that search through millions of web pages to track down specific keywords on a page and add the site to a database. When a search query uses one of these keywords, sites in the respective database will appear as search results. This is something that we as businesses need to know and utilize in our online content. By paying specific attention to how we phrase various parts of our content, we can make our content appear higher on a search result. The easiest way to do this is to imagine what a potential customer would Google to find your page, and then include the words from that search in your page as you build it. For us here at DigiFox, the phrase “Web Development and Digital Marketing” is king, and we make sure to repeat it often enough to make Google take notice.

In addition to the keywords used by Google, the age of your content does have an impact. Google tends to value sites that are regularly updated and built upon higher than sites that are stagnant. This means that the more frequently you add new information and tools to your site, the more likely it is to be picked by Google as highly relevant. A great way to accomplish this is by creating a blog. Blogs are great ways to spread your brand’s identity and communicate with your customers while also keeping you up to date and relevant to Google. It’s a win-win, and we can’t recommend doing so enough.

You Aren’t Utilizing Social Media

Google isn’t the only website that brings people to new places online, however. Social media platforms are another amazing tool that every business owner should utilize to spread their online presence. Being active on social media can be effective for a number of reasons. You’re able to interact directly with customers in an easy way, you’re able to show off your newest developments and identity with anyone online, and you can link your website to bring in a whole new stream of traffic. Building your social media platform can take some effort, but it will be well worth it in the end. Twitter sees over 100 million daily users, and Instagram sees over 500 million. These are massive pools of potential customers that could be swayed to visit your web-page if you work to develop strong online content. For more information on how to develop your social media pages, be sure to check out our earlier blog post How To Become A Social Media Expert.

Your Site is Too Slow/Inefficient

Once you have people actually clicking on your web-page, your job is far from done. Now, you have to ensure they actually stick around long enough to load and truly experience your website. Many young websites face a massive problem with this first step. Oftentimes, newer web-pages aren’t optimized properly, and as such, they don’t load quickly. This may sound like it’s not important, but this can have huge implications on your site’s traffic. According to studies conducted by Google, there is a steep negative correlation between loading times and web-page visitors. In fact, if a web-page takes more than three seconds to load, more than 60% of users click away. In our modern world of instant gratification, this makes sense. When you search for something on Google, you want the answer fast. Waiting for a page to load is counterproductive, so your natural inclination is to move onto the next. This is an issue we desperately want to avoid with our pages, lest we lose out on massive amounts of users.

The best way to prevent this load-time issue is to manage the nuts and bolts of your website. Going into the code itself can reveal many issues that arise from overly complicated scripts and other errors. Aside from this, the content of your web-page should be thoroughly analyzed before posting. Are you using images? If so, make sure that these images are easily loaded and not too big, otherwise your entire page can suffer. There are a lot of other complex coding tips that could easily help to speed up a web-page, and we here at DigiFox know more than a few tricks. Feel free to contact us or even Start a Project, and we can really dig into the heart of your website to truly optimize it and increase your audience.  

Your Site is Unintuitive and Hard to Follow

So, we’ve finally gotten people to load up your website and they’ve gotten to the main page. We technically have a visitor, but now comes the task of guiding them through the entire website. While the home page is the ideal landing zone for a visitor to your site, it shouldn’t house every single aspect of your business. On the contrary, now we need to guide visitors from the first step throughout the rest of the site. Many users will leave a web-page in the first 15 seconds if it is difficult to navigate and find information. To ensure that these users stick around long enough to experience our brand, we have to make our site intuitive.

There are many ways that we can make our site easy to follow. Once again, I find the easiest way to do this is to think like a visitor rather than a host. When you load up any website’s homepage, where do your eyes go first? Oftentimes, web users will scan the top of a page in search of drop-down menus and other forms of navigation. Making links and other tools to navigate your site obviously positioned is key to keeping customers around. No one wants to hunt to view more content; we want it displayed clearly, and with signposts leading us further down the road. Make sure to focus on these features, and you will keep a visitor’s attention for longer, potentially even making them into a repeat customer.

Mobile Devices Can’t Run It

The final step to ensuring that we’ve captured a broad enough audience is to pay attention to other platforms that users could use to visit our site. As cell phones have become more and more common throughout the world, the need for a strong mobile version has grown too. Whenever a question or need comes up on the go, people immediately reach for their pocket and open Google. Now that our site is geared towards Google’s relevancy standards, our site is appearing higher and higher on the list. But, if a mobile user opens our site and is met with an unreadable mess, then we just missed out on a customer. Consider how many times a day people use their phones to go online for both Google and social media, and we’ve suddenly realized just how massive a customer base mobile users represent.

Making your website effective on mobile devices isn’t easy. It takes a lot of technical work behind the scenes to keep all of the relevant information present and accessible on smaller screens, and keep every link in an appropriate spot for touch screens. Some easy fixes include getting rid of any Flash content, manage the size of all of your content to make it fit well, and use reasonably sized and styled fonts. Still, these are only surface level fixes. The best way to keep your site consistent between any platform is by looking for professional help, and that’s where we here at DigiFox step in. We can handle all of the technical aspects of your web-page to ensure that it represents your company well, whether on a desktop or a cellphone. All it takes is for you to Start A Project today, and we can make sure that your website sees the increase in traffic that you’re looking for.